Abstract
Individuals with social anxiety disorders tend to hold attentional bias toward threatening stimuli in social contexts regardless of task relevance. Although attentional bias is relatively consistent, findings on memory performance are mixed. This study examined attentional and memory biases toward threat stimuli in individuals with high levels of social anxiety. Participants included 19 individuals with high social anxiety (HSA) and another 20 individuals with low social anxiety (LSA). They performed a continuous attention task to measure attentional bias to threat. Afterward, they performed an unexpected memory task using distracting stimuli from the previous attention task to measure memory bias to task-irrelevant threatening stimuli. The results indicated that the HSA and LSA groups exhibited an initial attentional bias toward emotional faces. However, only the HSA group displayed prolonged attentional bias and demonstrated memory bias toward angry faces. Conversely, the LSA group exhibited attentional bias toward happy faces after 4 s. The findings imply that the absence of bias toward positive stimuli and the presence of bias toward negative stimuli may contribute to the maintenance and severity of social anxiety pathology.
keyword : Attentional Bias, Facial Expressions, Memory Bias, Social Anxiety Disorder, 주의 편향, 얼굴 정서, 기억 편향, 사회 불안 장애
